The Americans take them shackled and hooded on to transport aircraft to
Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or 10 men. They are given cots with
blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly
because the Americans want to watch their prisoners at all times.
But United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin
Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost
impossible to crack the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have
resorted to primitive methods of communication that cut individual members
of al-Qa'ida off from all information.
This extraordinary, grim scenario comes from an American intelligence
officer just back from Afghanistan who agreed to talk to The Independent –
and to supply his own photographs of prisoners – on condition of
anonymity. His prognoses were chilling and totally at variance with the
upbeat briefings of the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Even in
Pakistan, he says, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off
members of al-Qa'ida to avoid American-organized raids.
"We didn't catch whom we were supposed to catch," the officer told me.
"There was an over-expectation by us that technology could do more than it
did. Al-Qa'ida are very smart. They basically found out how we track them.
They realized that if they communicated electronically, our Rangers would
swoop on them. So they started using couriers to hand-carry notes on paper
or to repeat messages from their memory and this confused our system. Our
intelligence is hi-tech – they went back to primitive methods that the
Americans cannot adapt to."
The American officer said there were originally "a lot of high-profile
arrests". But the al-Qa'ida cells didn't know what other members were
doing. "They were very adaptive and became much more decentralized. We
caught a couple of really high-profile, serious al-Qa'ida leaders but they
couldn't tell us what specific operations were going to take place. They
would know that something big was being planned but they would have no
idea what it was."
The officer, who spent at least six months in Afghanistan this year,
was scathing in his denunciation of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek
warlord implicated in the suffocation of up to a thousand Taliban
prisoners in container trucks. "Dostam is totally culpable and the US
believes he's guilty but he's our guy and so we won't say so."
Gen Dostam uses Turkish military intelligence men as bodyguards. "There
was concern in the Isaf [International Security Assistance Force] that the
Turks who run it would create ethnic problems, which is one reason the
Turkish army does not share the Kabul Isaf compounds with other Isaf
troops. But one of the things we failed to do was create a real
government. We let the warlords firmly entrench themselves and now they
can't be dislodged," he said.
According to the same officer, American security agents in Karachi were
looking for the murderers of US journalist Daniel Pearl but there, as in
many other cases, they would find their arrest "targets" had fled because
of secret support within middle ranks of the Pakistani army. "We would go
with the Pakistanis to a location but there would be no one there because
once the middle level of the Pakistani military knew of our plans, they
would leak the information. In the North-West Frontier province, the
frontier corps is a second-rate army – they are a lot more anti-Western in
sentiment than the main Pakistani army. In the end we had to co-ordinate
everything through Islamabad."
As for the hundreds of prisoners taken in Afghanistan, the American
officer insisted that none were beaten "now" although he claimed ignorance
about earlier evidence that soldiers based in Kandahar had broken the
bones of captives after their initial arrest. "Only prisoners who were
likely to be violent or unco-operative are hooded and their hands are tied
behind their backs with plastic restraint bands. Sometimes we would take
the hoods off prisoners when they were traveling in our helicopters, at
other times not.
"In Kandahar, in what we call their living areas, the prisoners are
given cots with blankets and Adidas suits and runners, but they have no
privacy. There are no sides to their living areas because we have to see
them all the time. They have no privacy in the bathroom. Some of them
masturbate when they are looking at the female guards. Our guards had no
reaction to this. They are soldiers. When the interrogations take place,
the prisoners are allowed to sit. I don't want to get into specifics about
the questions we ask them.
He said: "There was non- co-operation at the beginning. But they had a
misconception that they were going to be treated the way they treated each
other. When they're not tortured, I think this has a lot to do with
changing their opinion."
But the Americans were even short of translators. "We recruited
Farsi-speakers who can speak the local version of Persian in Afghanistan,
Dari. They would be civilians hired in the US. But they had to go through
full security procedures and out of every five, only one or two would be
given security clearance."
The American officer also had a low opinion of the Western journalists
he met at Bagram. "They just hung around our base all day. Whenever we had
some special operation, we'd offer the journalists some facility to go on
patrol with our special forces and off they'd go – you know, 'we're on
patrol with the special forces' – and they wouldn't realize we were
stringing them along to get them out of the way."
© 2002 lndependent Digital (UK) Ltd
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